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Neun Gesänge, Op 69

Recordings

Following the iconic series of the complete songs of Schubert and Schumann, Graham Johnson’s latest enterprise traverses the complete songs of Brahms. He is joined here on Volume 2 by the wonderful Christine Schäfer, whose contribution to the Schu ...» More

Graham Johnson’s complete Schubert and Schumann songs series for Hyperion are landmarks in the history of recorded music. Now this indefatigable performer and scholar turns to the songs and vocal works of Brahms. Hyperion is delighted to present t ...» More

Ah, I miss it, it is not there,
The sweet joy that once was mine;
Ah, I miss it, it is not there,
That which gave me such pleasure!
The sweet joy that once was mine
Has ebbed away like the wave.
Ah, I miss it, it is not there,
That which gave me such pleasure!

Say, how can one till a field
Without a plough, without a horse!
Say, how can one till a field
When the wheel breaks?
Alas, such tilling
Is like love,
Is like love,
When there’s no kissing.

What they keep forcing on me
Fills me with torment,
What they keep forcing on me
Is agony:
They force the widower on me,
He whose heart is not whole;
Half belongs to his first wife,
So only half would be mine!

Long before Brahms officially assembled his 49 Volkslieder in 1893–4 he gloried in the creation of a different kind of song with piano, a folksong-Lied which had some of the characteristics of his folksong arrangements and some of the qualities of the more serious, full-blown Lieder for which he had long been famous. This liberation and blurring of boundaries was facilitated by the right kind of poetry—far removed from the work of such creators as Goethe, Eichendorff or Mörike. What especially appealed to Brahms, and increasingly as he got older, was folk poetry; he was extremely partial to lyrics, sometimes age-old, that came from far-flung corners of Eastern Europe and the old Austrian empire, the lyrics of poor and simple peasants from Bohemia and Serbia—the love songs of half-forgotten minorities like the Sorbs (or Wends) which were often translated by such literary specialists as Josef Wenzig and Siegfried Kapper (also Hoffmann von Fallersleben) who, as a result, have been assigned an honoured place in Lieder history. Brahms seemed to glory in the domestic dramas of the working-classes, particularly as expressed by mothers and their daughters. Very often men in these scenarios are merely pale shadows, problems to be talked about, or lovers to be cursed—as is the case in this little lament. The composer here invents a charming little introductory ritornello. This introduces the girl, after quite a bit of improvisatory arpeggiation, with a rather saucy dominant seventh, that signals she has the platform required to confide her version of events to anyone who will listen. The Unruhig marking indicates she is not at ease or happy about the situation she finds herself in—parted from a handsome boyfriend and married off by her family to an old, and possibly impotent, husband. On the other hand, another marking includes the word grazioso: this girl is clever and charming, and she will get her own way through whatever guile is necessary. The curious accompaniment, unexpectedly awkward to play, is one of those Brahms brain-teasers that is strangely off the beat when the ear least expects it. This pianistic background (repeated here three times for three verses) provides little illustrative or psychological insight, but the vivacity and resourcefulness of the girl comes through loud and clear. At the end, when we come to the postlude derived from the introduction, we feel that the singer is far from defeated by what lies before her; rather will she use every resource at her disposal to make alternative arrangements. We have been warned.

O cliff, dear cliff,
Why didn’t you tumble town,
When I had to part
From my true love?
Bring the dusk, God, bring the dusk,
That evening might soon beckon,
And that soon my love
Might sink into the dusk!

This is another folksong-like setting, the poem is Slovakian this time, and it is another girl’s very different reaction to an arranged marriage—certainly it is more of a conventional plaint than Klage I. Once again simplicity (the marking is Einfach) is the order of the day. In this case both the piano introduction, another ritornello, and the vocal line at ‘Lass dämmern, Gott, lass dämmern’, are ornamented by curious little melismas of demisemiquavers that shudder up the stave, first in the piano and echoed by the voice. These outbursts of dexterity seem to be in the character of a baroque vocal line, but they also might be thought to resemble those guttural, sob-like ornamentations that genuine folk singers add spontaneously to their narratives. (It is possible that Brahms heard this kind of improvisatory singing, from gypsies perhaps, on his travels.) This song is completely strophic and so the same vocal line is accompanied by the same accompaniment for three verses, although the dying fall of the ‘versink’ in the first strophe is considerably more appropriate there than when the same music is made to fit the later verses. It is up to the singer to unfold her story, and the weight of her unhappiness; she is supported by a sober and judicious accompaniment (apart from these little shuddery outbursts of feeling) that gently commiserates with her plight without highlighting it. Eric Sams points out that the inspiration for this vocal melody may have been another piece about a young girl, an orphan this time, abandoned to her fate: Schumann’s Armes Waisenkind, a piano piece from the children’s album Op 68. The same composer’s Intermezzo Op 4 No 3 employs those demisemiquaver as a recurring motif.

This is another strophic song and another work that seems scarcely different in shape, texture, or subject matter, from a folksong arrangement. This is a man’s song from the textual point of view but it was placed within an opus number that includes women’s songs and was apparently designated at one time as a group of ‘Mädchenlieder’. Although sung from a man’s point of view the text speaks of an abandoned girl, and it is this that seems to have roused Brahms’s interest and his sympathy. The singer must part, and the music, already sounding harmonically (or rather modally) restless in the introduction, travels in semiquavers that seem eager to set off on their journey. The melody is touching without being superbly memorable, the accompaniment is concerned with harmonic filling rather than apposite observation. To understand how excited Brahms was to explore this kind of folksong mode, seemingly self-effacing in its deliberate limiting of expression and pianistic challenge, one has to see him as the pioneer he actually was. No one else at the time (apart from Dvorák perhaps) was interested in music of this kind, the music of the people. The composer was proud to believe, with some justification, that he was fostering a new and authentic alternative to the self-indulgent and over-rarefied (for this read Wagnerian) preoccupations of modern German opera.

This is a folksong text that provides the inspiration for an irresistible art-song. The vocal line is down to earth and lively enough, but it is presented within the framework of such a masterly, and tricky, accompaniment, the whole delivered with such joie de vivre and relish, that the guise of folk music is swept away by the sophistication required to perform it and the very worldly pleasure it engenders in the listener. Ravel said of Poulenc that he could write his own folksongs (which were not folksongs at all) and the same is true of Brahms. The piano-writing, hocketing crab-like in merry duplets, bustles up and down the keyboard. This is appropriately illustrative of the scheming and planning of a girl who is her own woman, a strong personality capable of tenderness but also defiant when necessary. The addition of the word ‘heimlich’ to the marking, and the fact the piano interludes are mostly marked piano (and never louder than mezzo forte), indicates that the singer will use whatever guile is necessary to get her own way with her over-controlling and bad-tempered father. She knows who she wants to marry and is not above forcing the issue. Not even Lauretta, the girl with a problem father in Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, would dream of becoming pregnant to ensure she marries whom she pleases, but this Bohemian girl is as fertile as the wheatfields surrounding her parental smallholding, and cunning with it. Rather than have a shouting match with her father she will engineer a fait accompli; there will soon come a time when her father will be only too relieved to give her away to the father of her unborn child. When the vocal line begins (it mirrors the leaping piano-writing with dancing mazurka-like duplets of its own) the accompaniment is reduced to gently strummed chords. The first three verses are strophic and the ritornello precedes each of them. Between the third and fourth strophes, however, the singer is too impatient, too delighted with her own plan, and too eager to leave home, to wait for the pianist’s interlude. This fourth verse is taken at a faster tempo, and for the first time the accompaniment is enlivened by germinating left-hand quavers that add a touch of uplifting yeast to the bun in the oven. The short postlude ends on a high: the problem has been solved, love is triumphant, and the rather disagreeable father has been trounced into the bargain.

Josef Wenzig (1807–1876) was an important figure in Czech literature, and a strong proponent of the right of Czechs to study their own language in schools. He was completely bilingual so he made it his life’s work to connect the German-speaking world with the beauties of Czech folk literature in order to foster a greater understanding between the two cultures. He also wrote a number of guide books and was the librettist of Smetana’s operas Dalibor and Libuše. Wenzig’s Westslawischer Märchenschatz is the source of the four songs on this disc from Op 69; in its pages the composer also found the poems for two further solo songs, as well as two duets, a vocal quartet and choral music.

In his Neuere Gedichte (1851) the Swiss poet Gottfried Keller prints a sixteen-poem section entitled ‘Von Weibern’—‘Of Women’—supposedly pen portraits of different females, some of them modelled on real women, others on literary archetypes. In fact Keller’s Gretchen relates to Faust, his Helene has dealings with Trojan warriors, and his Walpurgis knows all about witches. In later editions of his poems Keller kept only the better lyrics and ditched the literary names and allusions: when Hugo Wolf came to set the same text in 1890 (as Singt mein Schatz wie ein Fink) he made merciless fun of Brahms’s music, berating him for bad prosody and cavalier alterations to the text, eventually guessing that the older composer had used an entirely different edition. Wolf possessed the 1883 Gedichte where only some of the ‘Von Weibern’ poems are incorporated, and then only in a subsection more prudishly named ‘Alte Weisen’—‘Old Tunes’, six of which Wolf composed.

Brahms has fun in finding ebullient music for Salome, who is a real little madam. She is insistent on seducing the man she has her eye on, no matter what she has to do to get him, and she seems to have the power to threaten other women who might get in her way. A girl who can threaten a fiery sword (a sword perhaps capable of severing a head if it belongs to someone uncooperative) must surely be more than a distant relation of the biblical character we encounter in the New Testament’s Matthew Chapter 14. There is no doubt that the final lines of the poem seem to be as much a threat as a declaration of devotion. Keller describes the man in the story as ‘proud’ (‘stolz’), an adjective Brahms changes to ‘dear’ (‘teuer’). Keller’s choice of word better fits the biblical character. The story of Salome lusting after the head of John the Baptist as recounted by Richard Strauss via Oscar Wilde is a distressing one, but the grand guignol aspects of the tale can also be amusing. In a New Statesman literary competition in the 1950s entrants were challenged to encapsulate a gruesome literary episode in very few words: the winner came up with: ‘Salome dear, not in the Fridge!’

The most famous things about the biblical Salome are that she is a dancer, and that she gets her way with Herod by tantalizing her stepfather with a dance of seven veils. Is it thus a coincidence that Wolf (who did not have the name ‘Salome’ in his text to point him to such an intepretation) writes a song in dance rhythm with a triumphant postlude? His music gets progressively faster as if he had the successive casting off of seven veils in mind; in the Brahms, the imagery of the sword (‘Ein feurig Schwert’) inspires circular repetitions of triplets that suggest the girl is brandishing and swinging the weapon over her head as the music comes to a close. In pianistic terms Wolf’s is even more dangerously savage (his postludes were always tailored to his own virtuosity). Brahms’s song also provides an uncharacteristically exultant ending, and his music has a touch of biblical pastiche about it, film music avant la lettre: in the first seven bars, with their insistent open-fifth chords in C major, we might imagine clashing cymbals and twanging harps, as well as the prancing of a girl high on her own beauty and power. She confesses to being capable of snake-like behaviour, and the piano writing and vocal line writhe accordingly. One is reminded that a few years later, in the Goethe setting Unüberwindlich, Brahms takes on another biblical siren—Samson’s dangerous consort Delilah.

The mother calls, calls to her daughter
Across three mountain ranges:
‘Tell me, Mara, dearest daughter,
Is the linen bleached?’

The young daughter calls back to her
Across nine mountain ranges:
‘I haven’t yet dipped the linen, mother,
Into the water,
For Jawo came, O look,
And muddied the water,
So how could I, dear mother,
Have bleached the linen yet!
Curse him, mother, dear mother,
I shall curse him too,
May God in bright Heaven
Grant that he hang himself—
Hang himself on an evil tree,
On my white neck!
May God in bright Heaven
Grant that he be imprisoned—
Imprisoned in a deep dungeon,
On my white breast!
May God in Heaven grant
That he be put in chains—
Chains that are tightly clasped
By my white arms!
May God in bright Heaven grant
That the waters take him—
That the wild waters take him
And bring him home to me!’

This poem (again from Kapper’s Die Gesänge der Serben, and there entitled ‘Fluch ihm, Mutter, ich auch will ihm fluchen’) has a complicated scenario. The mother clearly hates the man who has seduced her daughter Mara and taken her virginity—thus all the references to the bleaching of linen with its tell-tale blood-stains. As the mother had always suspected (and the girl had not) this Serbian Lothario, Jawo by name (although Kapper calls him, perhaps more authentically, Jowo) is a bad piece of work—or at the very least he has been unfaithful. The mother curses him roundly, and so does the daughter. But there is a major difference: the girl still loves Jawo with uncontrollable passion and with the single-mindedness of the dangerously jealous she still needs to possess him, dead or alive. Yes, he deserves to die a horrible death (as a suicide, in prison, drowned) but she still needs him and longs for him, and will have him back on any terms, even if only as a corpse. Each of these outcomes whereby Jawo is cursed to a miserable end is subverted mid-stream, and mid-strophe, into equally violent erotic imagery. Love and hate are felt simultaneously and Brahms embraces the musical challenges of all this with considerable relish. It is a big song on a large emotional canvas. A bar of opening triplets, an octave apart between the hands, and already seething in intensity, announces both the folksong aspect of the coming music, and its dark, Eastern-European provenance. The vocal line in Brahms’s best tradition of newly minted folk music is accompanied by broadly strummed chords—all in all a grimly earnest Serbian mazurka, rather more heavy-handed than the Chopinesque variety. The mother’s question is heard in the minor key, but with the daughter’s first reply (‘Nicht in’s Wasser, liebe Mutter’) the music moves into A major. With the vehemence of ‘Fluch’ ihm, Mutter’ the minor key re-establishes itself. The music now progresses via a stringendo to a new section with a change of key and time signatures (F sharp minor, 2/4) and a new tempo marking—Schnell und sehr lebhaft. Hungarian Rhapsodies have their contrasting slinky slow and madly fast sections—Lassú and Friss; what we hear now is a fast section (the French might have termed it a galop) which has an almost Lisztian extravagance. In this thrice-repeated music, semiquavers rattle in mad oscillation and left-hand octaves chase these down the keyboard in swift pursuit. The vocal line takes on an almost operatic cast. Right-hand broken chords encompass, most unusually, a stretch of a tenth. The boy is envisaged hanging on a tree … and then, in a soaring moment of vocal expansion … hanging on her white neck. The same music has her imagining Jawo imprisoned … and imprisoned on her breast. The next verse casts him in chains … but chained in her arms. There is a short return to the slower music of the first section (Wenig langsamer) and this leads to the song’s final page and a return to the faster of the two tempi. We then realize that from the beginning of the faster section Brahms has envisaged this as water music, not the music of the stream where the women do the washing and bleaching of linen, but of the destructive storms and floods that regularly bring death and havoc to this benighted part of the world. Waves of arpeggiated sound, as powerful as any Brahms accompaniment, bring the body of the girl’s lover into her house, dead certainly, but once more hers alone. The postlude reflects this grisly and pyrrhic victory with triumphant glee. An alternative reading of the poem may have imagined the daughter deflecting her mother’s curses by pretending to partake in them and then defiantly expressing her love for Jawo before the curse is completed. But even if this were the case, the deeply engaged vehemence of Brahms’s music scarcely allows for such an interpretation.